Don’t be silly. She’s clearly budding.
Sure, but those presumably weren’t explicitly designed to be understood by anyone but themselves. That’s more like asking some aliens to decipher my dashboard warning lights.
Funny!
This. We here in this discussion, working casually as a few dozen individuals with little or no cryptographic background, are scrutinizing the plaques for a couple of minutes before giving up. An alien civilization who finds the plaques will likely be highly motivated; it’s not hard to imagine that they might put a large team of their best and brightest on the job for weeks, months, or even years. Presumably some number of the team would have skills in cryptography, language, and/or other areas that would help them make sense of it. Maybe they’d even broadcast an image of it to their entire race and say “hey, anyone have any idea what these chicken scratches are all about?” And eventually one (or more) among their billions with the requisite education/knowledge/intellect would recognize binary encoding, or the pulsar map, or the hydrogen transition stuff.
They will understand it eventually.
It’s the Voyager recording. When they find that, and play it at the right speed, I hope they’ll find it alone was worth the effort.
I think that they will just pop the thing into their logic analyzer and it will determine likely translations to the Golden Record.
I mean, think of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The computer on The Enterprise was pretty awesome. You could ask it to figure out all sorts of things. You knew that real bad stuff was going down when the computer system went offline.
I don’t think its a far stretch for some race of Space People to have a computer loaded with at least an Iron Man type of AI.
I think it really depends on the psychology of the aliens who find it.
If they have similar psychology to us (unlikely), then it would be reasonable for them to think that a possible goal of this was to show who we were and where we are. In that case the figures are pretty self explanatory. As for the pulsar map, it is a bit more obscure but if you think that this is going to be transmitted to the entire scientific population and have every theory imaginable thrown at it someone in the next few centuries would happen to notice that they match the coordinates of pulsars.
However, if it reaches a society that has an entirely different set of values (more likely), for example it might be that drawing on this world is primarily used to commemorate military victory, in which case the people could be seen to be beings we destroyed, with a large explosion like the one on the left, while the upper corner shows our tribe’s sigil. But even this view involves basically human-like motivations where alien motivations are likely represent something that is so completely different that it isn’t even possible to speculate about.
It’s possible we might be the source of countless alien PhD’s.
As I understand it the aliens think it’s a challenge and then start an intergalactic war based on 1980s video games.
You’re assuming that the aliens will think we absolutely must share their cultural values. If they’re smart enough to be spacefarers, then they’re smart enough to be open-minded as they try to find a translation that makes the most sense. Given enough time, someone among the aliens might advance the interpretation you describe, but then what of the markings in the explosion that are similar to the markings below each planet? Clearly that’s not just an explosion, or perhaps it’s not an explosion at all. The “military conquest” interpretation fits, but not particularly well - and so the discussion would continue, and better interpretations would be sought. Maybe I’m guilty of assuming cultural values too, but I have to believe they would spend more than just a couple of minutes pondering this thing before moving on; it seems almost a certainty to me that they would put the equivalent of many man-years of thought into it.
Certainly the reverse would be true. Imagine if an analogous artifact crash-landed on earth, how many doctoral students in linguistics would be studying such a thing for their dissertation.
D - r - i - n - k - m - o - r - e - o - v - a - l - t - i - n - e
Thanks for the link Jophiel!
Well that sounds like the premise of a sci-fi story, rather than something actually plausible in reality. How would a species that can only think of a single hypothesis for a phenomenon have advanced to the level of making spaceships? *
Does this species have guys who are good at pattern-matching? Based on what we know it seems a likely pre-requisite – much of problem-solving is pattern matching. All of maths could be considered the study of patterns, for example. How could they fail to spot that the arrangement of lines matches a nearby star cluster?
- Since we’re obviously assuming that if anyone ever sees these plaques it will be by intercepting them in space. The probes would not survive entering a planet’s atmosphere or colliding with a planet’s surface.
But knowing they’ve made spaceships already implies they are like us in some ways.
But sure, we won’t know until we actually encounter an extraterrestrial species, if we ever do. All we can do is extrapolate from what we know. Some hypotheses seem more likely than others.
Just more junk mail - what are these guys selling?